Tools for Editing Kindle .mobi Files?

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I hate that so many publishers/authors build their eBooks without using the basic standard HTML tags. Instead of using H1, H2, H3 many use a P tag with a gosh-awful CSS class call out. HELLO, that makes autocreation of TOCs a no go!! I personally like a minimalist approach to CSS within eBooks. If I have to modify a book, the first thing I do is strip out all the garbage from the CSS file. No need to remove the CSS classes and what not from each HTML file as it will be ignored if it cannot be found in the CSS file. Next I make sure each chapter/section heading has an H1 or H2 tag. If it is not to much work I also make sure all subheadings have a heading tag as well. It usually isn't too time consuming, but some publishers seem to use a different class for every subheading (within the same level) making a search replace impossible. Idiots!

Oh the coding on some ebooks are horrible! I agree they are not consistent either in their coding. It's like each person did a chapter and used their own CSS. Calibre can clean most of that up making it easy to get a TOC. It removes all those stupid font tags which specify what font to use by converting them into the style sheet. I then edit the CSS sheet removing all font family references. Much easier then removing each font reference tag by it's own. I use Word first though to quickly fix the inconsistencies I find.

[DiapDealer]

Instead of using H1, H2, H3 many use a P tag with a gosh-awful CSS class call out.

H* tags always trigger a page-break-before on the Kindle. That's not always desirable. Like chapter numbers with a (same-sized) chapter name beneath it. Nobody wants a pagebreak in between those two items, so they use a P tag with CSS to simulate a header.

I wish chapter headers were more consistently tagged, but I also understand why they're oftentimes not.

[Serpentine]

When doing conversions I find myself spending more and more time just doing everything in regex. Getting a bit too good at it really.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I wish chapter headers were more consistently tagged, but I also understand why they're oftentimes not.

Yeah, it doesnt help that a lot of tools that use automatic tidying break completely valid markup, for chapter markers and part/book pages I generally just use a single h2 tag, throw in a line break, horizontal row and the rest - looks perfect on everything, even converts to mobi without trouble. However every now and then I'll tidy and prettyprint... forgetting. Next thing I know there's 3 h2's, empty paragraphs, styled hr's and a whole load of spans and inline css - urgh

But anyway, I'd suggest anyone that does conversion from sites/pdf/poor formats in general should get hold of the terribly-badly-named RegexBuddy - makes life a whole lot easier; I guess there might be a free/OSS tool similar, but last I looked they were pretty lacking.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

H* tags always trigger a page-break-before on the Kindle. That's not always desirable. Like chapter numbers with a (same-sized) chapter name beneath it. Nobody wants a pagebreak in between those two items, so they use a P tag with CSS to simulate a header.

I wish chapter headers were more consistently tagged, but I also understand why they're oftentimes not.

That's another pet peeve of mine: separating the chapter number from the chapter title. If you place both of those in separate paragraphs the TOC looks bad. I prefer placing both in the same paragraph and on the same line, but if aesthetically speaking separate lines are more appealing then I use <br /> between them.

[DiapDealer]

That's another pet peeve of mine: separating the chapter number from the chapter title. If you place both of those in separate paragraphs the TOC looks bad. I prefer placing both in the same paragraph and on the same line, but if aesthetically speaking separate lines are more appealing then I use <br /> between them.

I don't disagree... it's just that I've given up on relying on any sort of successful auto-generated TOC. I just get my hands dirty and manually make it what I want it to be.

I hear you, but my philosophy is to spend less time editing than reading the book. Most books I don't edit much, if any. But I've been unfortunate enough to buy a string of Topaz books lately, and those definitely need editing. For one, I must convert them to mobi from Topaz. Once that is done you can count on a multitude of OCR errors. Search and replace becomes my good friend in those cases! I understand using Topaz for ebooks that were last printed 25 years ago, but I'm getting some new releases in Topaz.

[kamanza]

Originally posted by DiapDealer

For simple fixes, I use mobiunpack (it has a drag 'n' drop Applescript wrapper)... tweak the html... then rebuild with kindlegen.

Could you please explain to a newbie how to use mobiunpack?
Thanks.

[thomass]

this post might help: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...761#post149761

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by kamanza

Could you please explain to a newbie how to use mobiunpack?
Thanks.

Yes, if you want you can grab the latest version from here:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=297

If you are on Windows and would prefer to use a GUI interface and not the command line, you need to fully install the free community edition of ActiveState ActivePython 2.7.X.


1. Download the attached Mobi_Unpack_v0.39.zip

2. Unzip it (right-click and "Extract All" in Windows)

3. Inside the newly extracted Mobi_Unpack_v0.39 folder

Double-click Mobi_Unpack.pyw

4. In the window that pops up:

- Hit the first Browse... button and select your input mobi ebook file

- Hit the second Browse... button and select a destination folder for the unpacked files

- If you want to split combination mobis, examine the raw markup language, or turn on verbose debugging check the appropriate boxes

- Hit the "Start" button -

The unpacking will start and progress messages and any errors will be indicated in the scrollable Log window. If you run into problems, this Log output may be useful in finding and fixing the issue.

Then look in your destination folder for a mobi7 folder and inside of that you can find the html file, images directory, toc.ncx, content.opf that were processed and stored inside your mobi. You can edit the html any way you like and then use kindlegen on the content.opf file to recreate your modfied mobi ebook.

[barncat]

mokay, Diap guy, I'm beginning to see what you're saying. The answer on my own sad thread was a little abrupt, and I'm obviously not that savvy - so I'm still trying to figure all this out. But still - I opened that other .mobi with Springy, and now that puzzles me more than ever. I'm going to have to go back to the beginning and try to figure out how these utilities work. Starting from the beginning offers a HUGE learning curve. I mean, I can read the HTML and I know something about CSS, but I don't work with these things every day, so what I've learned I have to revisit every time I do a project. You guys all know so much, maybe you forget to have mercy on the grasshoppers among you. The CS5.5 inDesign plug in generates all that repetitive code you are talking about. The p tag before every flipping paragraph, even though there's no reason to reestablish the identity of the text. Like putting quotation marks around every word in a line of dialogue. But in looking at the generated HTML, I begin to see what I could do by hand, if I wanted to.

So do any of you have any insight now that inDesign's plug-in is up and running? I hate Calibre. The interface intimidates me - it doesn't feel intuitive at all. And are you guys PC or MAC, because it's hard for me to read the posts and understand them if I don't know which platform you're talking about.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by barncat

mokay, Diap guy, I'm beginning to see what you're saying. The answer on my own sad thread was a little abrupt, and I'm obviously not that savvy - so I'm still trying to figure all this out. But still - I opened that other .mobi with Springy, and now that puzzles me more than ever. I'm going to have to go back to the beginning and try to figure out how these utilities work. Starting from the beginning offers a HUGE learning curve. I mean, I can read the HTML and I know something about CSS, but I don't work with these things every day, so what I've learned I have to revisit every time I do a project. You guys all know so much, maybe you forget to have mercy on the grasshoppers among you. The CS5.5 inDesign plug in generates all that repetitive code you are talking about. The p tag before every flipping paragraph, even though there's no reason to reestablish the identity of the text. Like putting quotation marks around every word in a line of dialogue. But in looking at the generated HTML, I begin to see what I could do by hand, if I wanted to.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what you may be referring to. A quick glance shows that my last contribution to this particular thread was almost half-a-year ago. Sorry.

[DaleDe]

Barncat: you reopened a 3 year old file. Today check the unpack mobi thread for how to turn a mobi file back into the source which can be edited and rebuilt.

Dale

[barncat]

Sorry guys. I'm lousy at forums. I just trolled through looking for any help at all, but DD helped me on my own little thread. I'm an idiot.

[Justin Nemo]

Here's a little experiment I tried.

I converted an Open Office ODT file to epub and mobi in Calibre. The formatting was all over the place. I then edited the epub file in Sigil, which worked really well and is a great little program. Then I converted my newly Sigled epub to mobi in Calibre and the formatting was still all over the place in the mobi. So what is the best way to format your book?

[GettaGirl72]

Originally Posted by Justin Nemo

Here's a little experiment I tried.

I converted an Open Office ODT file to epub and mobi in Calibre. The formatting was all over the place. I then edited the epub file in Sigil, which worked really well and is a great little program. Then I converted my newly Sigled epub to mobi in Calibre and the formatting was still all over the place in the mobi. So what is the best way to format your book?

I was trying to correct the spacing, punctuation, typos on some of my .mobi files (and I am a complete amateur at all this... no python and coding in my repertoire...) and this path of conversion seemed to work pretty well for me, however it uses quite a bit of them but all the tools I used were free and relatively intuitive.

I converted the .mobi to .txt in Calibre, opened the .txt in OpenOffice Writer, did a select all and deleted any formatting, so I had a plain .odt file to edit. Once I had it edited as close to my physical copy of the book (I even scanned the maps and pictures and inserted them into the document, used character map for my Em Dashes, etc), I used the Export as PDF function to get a .pdf from the .odt. I used Calibre to convert the .pdf to .epub and used Sigil to edit the .epub with the headers for a generated TOC, add some italicizing, change font size, etc. It took some trial and error with Sigil as it didn't always convert back in Calibre from .epub to .mobi exactly as I expected. But, in the end, I had a practically perfect Kindle version.

I may try playing with the CSS classes as Blossom does, just to see if that helps in the conversions.

Anyway, that's how I got the best results when editing.